Plan Your Team’s Annual Leave in Just Half an Hour or Less

When planning a vacation for yourself or any of your team member and using a digital application to do so, one should take into consideration these five things in order to get things done effortlessly: accessibility, collaboration, scaling, the possibility to modify existing data and comfort.

Accessibility

One might think that a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, Numbers, Calc etc, might suffice for such an assignment, but in fact, several studies have shown, that the task is not as easy as it seems. Depending on your organization’s size, the size of the computer park, operation systems and several other things, the spreadsheet program might not be the best solution.

Firstly, it’s the version that is usually the biggest problem. For example, do you remember when a couple of years ago Microsoft introduced the .xlsx-extension to the world, i.e. launched a new version of the MS Office and what happened? The main concern then was, that since it was too expensive to buy a license for the entire organization, usually just the management got the new version. The old version, however, could not operate with the new version, so many of the documents sent by the management to its subordinates remained inaccessible.

Collaboration

Collaboration is something that is always important, when organizing an event or in this case, the annual leave. As I pointed out above, accessibility is number one, but if all else is left aside, the problem could be just as big. Let’s take collaboration for example: you might think, that sending a copy of a spreadsheet and granting everyone access to it might be enough, when in fact, the in order for this to work, only one person should have access to such a document, who could then make the relevant entries: start and end dates of vacations, names, replacements etc. If everyone is granted access to such a document, the rules have not been stated clearly and user’s rights have not been set properly, what you will get, is a genuine nightmare.

Scaling and the possibility to modify data

There is always something to add: there is always somebody you left out or something, that needs additional explaining, so it is good to know, that your all-mighty-annual-leave-plan won’t crash, if you make a small change like adding an additional person.That also means, that you should look for a an app, that is online (in the cloud) and therefore accessible by all members of your team.

Comfort a.k.a. user experience (UX)

User experience or UX as the people in the industry like to call it, is something that cannot be explained by the user itself. When everything works, the whole application ‘feels’ right and is based on a logic you understand right away, in nine cases out of ten, that is a sign of a good UX. You might even say that there is an inverse correlation between the amount of hassle you have to deal with and the quality of the app’s UX.

In this time and age where mostly where almost anything can be found online, to help you manage different daily tasks, try to keep the things mentioned above, in mind. By doing so, you’ll avoid any unnecessary problems, as well as keep everyone else happy.